4 Questions to Evaluate your Bed and Breakfast Website

Happy with your website? Or are you?

We want to help you evaluate your website, so we are asking 4 questions to evaluate your Bed and breakfast website. We will give you some quick tips to make your Bed & Breakfast website more productive.

Off the back our previous post regarding top website mistakes, we often speak wit website owners who are happy with there website despite the fact they have no idea how there website is performing. In one case the website was down and we tried to inform the owner who said he was happy with his website (he knew it had gone down too).

A customer makes an instant judgement of you business from the look of your website, is it modern, detailed and helpful or old, out of date, neglectful and hard to use.

When last was your website updated?

If the answer is anything more than a month we would suggest regularly updating your website not only with new content but checking broken links and relevant information is up to date.

If its more than 6 months to a year the question would need to be who manages your website and what are your expectations for your website. If it’s to generate new customers or a marketing tool then your website needs to be managed on a regular basis.

Anything more than a year we would suggest your website is in need of a spring clean. Updating your Facebook and not your website is also a common mistake. With modern websites a CMS (Content Management System) can make it just as easy as Facebook to update your website.

>UPDATE YOUR WEBSITE <<

How many people visit your website?

If you do not have Google Analytics, implement it now (Get started with analytics). Google analytics can help you

• See who and how many visit your site
• Identify how users got to your site
• Track which countries your visitors are from
• Find out how users interact with the pages on your site
• Monitor which visitors spend the most on your website
• See if users are finding the most relevant information
• Find out which other sites are sending traffic to you
• Discover which pages are being visited before a booking or call is mad

Once Google Analytics has been implemented you can start to use the data to get a better indication of who your customers are and find out what does and doesn’t work specifically for your business.

Tips – Things to look for

Unique visitors – A Bed and Breakfast, guesthouse or boutique hotel would want to find out when there website receives the most amount of unique visitors or if there is pattern matched with seasonality. This will allow you to be able to target those users at the right time with relevant promotions.

Traffic sources – To be able to identify what channel be it Trip Advisor, Booking.com, Google ads or other forms of online marketing are providing you with the most traffic. Knowing this data allows to be more effective with your marketing spend.

Top performing content – Blogging is a great way to aid inbound marketing, by being able to identify which content works best, you can hone in on your subject matter and provide users with relevant content to keep them coming back.

 

Is your website SEO optimised?

Building a good looking, user friendly website which cannot be seen is like having a fantastically designed shopping centre in the middle of the dessert.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process to specifically increase a website’s visibility on search engines (mainly Google), and improve search engine ranking. There are many factors which can be performed to assist in its search engine ranking.

Tips

There are many free tools which can give you a quick indication of of the state of your websites SEO status. We recommend Microsoft FREE SEO tool or Site Analyzer.

Here are some quick SEO tips which your Bed and Breakfast site should currently have implemented

Quick to load – One of the ranking factors is how quickly your web pages load. Having a fast loading web page helps aid a better user experience. Running a page speed test will give you an indicator of which elements may be causing your page to have longer loading times  https://gtmetrix.com/ 

Easy URLs – The easier the URL is to read the better for search engines. While the URL doesn’t have to be totally clean as long as it can be understood an enticing enough to those searching for its content.

Mobile Responsive – As an increasing number of people access the website through different devices this is a very important ranking factor as it will improve the user experience. 61% of people abandon a site right away that isn’t optimised for mobile.

Relevant Concise Keywords – What would your customers search to find you? Including a location will help with local SEO. An example would be Hertford Bed and Breakfast, you should also target terms which appeal to your target audience like Hertford Bed and Breakfast Family Break. Local attractions and landmarks are also good terms to try and rank for.

Inbound Links – Inbound links are a very important ranking factor, having links from relevant and quality sources will boost your ranking. A great tip is to ask relevant local business to link to your website.

Content – Regular quality content will also be a ranking factor. Having a blog will not only help you connect to customers but it can be used a tool to answer frequently asked questions. The goal here is to provide unique content, with real value to your audience something which isn’t provided elsewhere.

 

What % of bookings come from your hotel website?

I am sure most accommodation providers would love 100% booking through their website and no commission to pay however this is not the reality for a vast majority. A combination of both OTA and direct booking should be what you are looking for. According to a recent Google study 52% of users will visit your website after viewing you on an OTA.

Knowing what your direct booking ratio is allows you to have a plan to always be increasing direct bookings. Optimising your website for direct bookings could be a way of increasing your revenue.

 

So after asking 4 Questions to evaluate your Bed and breakfast website, could you make your site more productive?